The Developers

Westwood Studios

Westwood Studios was founded in 1985 under the name Westwood Associates. It was formed in a Las Vegas garage by Brett Sperry, an Arizona State University graduate of architecture and psychology, and Louis Castle, who had background in both fine arts and computer science. Westwood Associates' first game was The Temple of Apshai Trilogy, which was produced for Eypx in 1986. They continued working for the next 6 years, producing games such as Mars Saga, Battletech, DragonStrike, and Eye of the Beholder, for various other companies, including SSI and Infocom.

In 1992, Westwood Associates merged with Virgin Interactive and was renamed Westwood Studios, finally giving Westwood the ability to publish its own games. It quickly did, publishing Kyrandia Book I and Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty that same year.

The release of Dune II was the event that set the stage for the Command & Conquer series. In a 1999 interview, Brett Sperry said:

"Halfway through Dune II we knew there was a lot we weren't going to have time to fit into the game, so we put all those ideas into Command & Conquer. In the end, it was one of the few games I've made where literally everything I wanted in the game is in the game - and we managed to sell a few copies."

This Command & Conquer sold more than just a few copies; the Command & Conquer series was listed in the 1999 Guiness Book of Records as the Most Successful Strategy War Game, with over 10 million copies sold.

Westwood used what they learned from writing Dune II to write Command & Conquer, released in 1995. A year later, Westwood published a similar game based on World War II, called Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Two expansion packs were also released for Red Alert within the next year.

Just a month after they wrote the first Command & Conquer, Westwood wrote Monopoly CD-ROM, the first commercial game with Internet multiplayer support, though they did not publish it themselves.

Two months after Command & Conquer: Red Alert was released, Westwood published Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor, which did not receive much acclaim in the gaming press and did not sell many copies.

In 1998, Electronic Arts caught sight of Westwood Studios. Westwood was purchased, giving them access to a worldwide distrubution network for their next few titles.

EA Westwood and EA Los Angeles

Westwood's first project under Electronic Arts was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, a continuation of the story from the first C&C game. It was released in 1999 to meet mixed feelings from fans. Some thought there was nothing new in the game, so it wasn't that great, but others maintained that it was still the best RTS on the market. An expansion pack for Tiberian Sun, Firestorm was released early in 2000.

At nearly the same time, Westwood released Nox, a game similar to Blizzard's Diablo II but with a different mode of multiplayer and different game mechanics. Later that year, Westwood released Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, which did not follow the previous Command & Conquer storyline but was still a fairly good game. Nearly a year later, Westwood released Red Alert 2's expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge.

Early in 2002 Westwood released Command & Conquer: Renegade, the only C&C game that is not a Real Time Strategy game, but a First Person Shooter. The player is a commando named Havoc, living in the world of the original Command & Conquer. While Renegade is still popular in some places, it was not as good of a game as it was anticipated to be.

In 2003, EA Westwood and EA Pacific were merged with EALA, and the Westwood name was no longer used. However, EALA quickly published Command & Conquer: Generals, and seven months later they released an expansion pack called Zero Hour which, arguably, was a vast improvement over Generals.